Photo: Ryan
As September’s song begins to take hold, my wife and I are heading for a new beginning in Wisconsin. There are several reasons for the move but the short answer is THE FIRST GRANDSON whose name is Ryan and who lives with his parents in Chi…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on September 3, 2009 at 12:30pm —
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Photo: Burt Lake Trail Committee Chairman Gary Leads the First Group of Riders up a Hill Near Burt Lake.
If you read last week’s blog you may have noticed some inaccuracies in my depiction of Mark Trail, the environmental radio and comic strip hero of the Fifties. Some had to do with…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on August 23, 2009 at 10:48am —
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Trails need a hero.
Everybody else seems to have them. In this country every conceivable activity from pro football to cooking to bass fishing to motor cross has at least one star, someone to carry the flag for the cause.
OK, so trails are not an activity. True, but we prov…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on August 16, 2009 at 10:21am —
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Photo: Because of the difficulty in taking pictures while running, this snapshot is from earlier in the summer.
When a complete video record is not possible, maybe a snapshot will do. With our busy lives, full surveys of trail use in all the daylight hours are labor intensive and har…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on August 9, 2009 at 3:35pm —
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Photo: Two young entrepreneurs set up a trailside lemonade stand along the newly opened "Resort Bluffs" segment of the Little Traverse Wheelway just west of Petoskey.
How can you think about building trails during tough economic times? This is the subtext of several conversations that…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on August 2, 2009 at 10:07am —
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Sometimes we fret about what might happen tomorrow but often it turns out all right. Such was the case Friday night when my wife Sue and I contemplated the disaster that might occur Saturday morning during our group bicycle ride from Topinabee (on the west side of Mullet Lake in C…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on July 26, 2009 at 10:07am —
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Does a bike path qualify as a highway use? That’s the question Charlevoix County Road Commissioner Pat Harmon asked regarding deed restrictions claimed by some residents who object to the proposed trail alongside the Boyne City to Charlevoix Road (C-56.) The resident…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on July 19, 2009 at 4:02pm —
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By the time you read this, the DNR will have pulled or cut the trees off the Petoskey to Mackinaw City Trail and done something with the beaver dam (see photo) that caused what looked to one user like a “washout.” From the original complaint, that would leave only the weeds t…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on July 13, 2009 at 3:41pm —
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I recently helped one of our local trail committees prepare one of its grant applications, not usually the most exciting of tasks. The silver lining however, is that it forces us to bring together information that sometimes stays diffused for a long time. The following are two…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on July 3, 2009 at 3:22pm —
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A couple of weeks ago a lady called our office to inquire about conditions on one of our trails. It seemed that her's and one or two other families were planning a longer trip that would take several days and include our Petoskey to Mackinaw City Trail that she had noticed was “unimpro…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on June 28, 2009 at 10:21am —
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It was a great day of community celebration, the ribbon cutting for the…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on June 20, 2009 at 5:22pm —
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Sigmund Freud once remarked that sometimes a ride is just a ride, or something to that effect. I say that may be true but that some rides are more than others. Case in point: the ride next Saturday, June 20, from East Park at Bay Harbor to dedicate the new segment of the Little Trave…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on June 13, 2009 at 7:47pm —
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Speaking of trails, there are other few venues in which the weather determines the success or failure of an activity. This has been a disappointingly cool and rainy spring. So how are we doing with our trail events so far? May 16 loop ride from Harbor Springs. Grade F, a tot…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on June 7, 2009 at 4:11pm —
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The following article was written by Erin Fanning, an ac…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on May 30, 2009 at 3:12pm —
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I had a little surprise today. Just for the fun of it I typed in the names of our trails (separately) into the Web Search Box on my computer and was astonished at what I found. All of them immediately flashed to our website at www.trailscouncil. org and in a second I was reading abou…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on May 24, 2009 at 4:07pm —
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This morning as I ran along the Little Traverse Wheelway from the History Museum to a little way past the main entrance to Bay Harbor and back I noticed something different from a similar run ten days or so ago. This time there were arrows, numbers, and lines, all in pink,…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on May 10, 2009 at 11:08am —
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Remember how as kids we used to mess around in the back yard, at the lake, the crick, the woods? How we played outside with adult supervision but mostly without? Well, apparently kids don’t do much of that anymore.
According to various studies there has been a cultural shift over the last few decades in which children spend more time indoors in sedentary activities. The predictable result has been kids who not only don’t know much about nature but are increasingly obese and out of shape. Why ha…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on May 3, 2009 at 3:11pm —
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A TRAIL STORY
You probably wouldn’t give a man much credit for reinventing the wheel, but what about a man who reinvents the Wheelway?
The man in question is Dr. John Shields and the Wheelway is the Little Traverse Wheelway from Charlevoix to Harbor Springs that is nearing completion this summer.
The “reinvention” had to occur because the original wheelway from Petoskey to Harbor Springs that had been built around 1890 during a bicycle boom had fallen into disuse and eventually was forgotten.…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on April 26, 2009 at 11:00am —
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WHAT I WAS GOING TO BLOG ABOUT
With the crocuses in the driveway already croaked and the daffodils just starting to blaze. I thought it would be a good time to describe a little known yet magical season that usually occurs around this time of year in the waters of Little Traverse Bay. Generally speaking, when blue streaks begin cutting diagonally across the ice and the edges of the ice show signs of letting go we look forward to the season of the little icebergs. The winds agitate the open wate…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on April 19, 2009 at 11:30am —
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What We’re Going to do this Summer.
Except for some glorious snow shoeing, all winter long we at the Top of MichiganTrails Council have been staring at computer screens doing the mundane work of planning the warm weather events that make it all worthwhile. Now it’s time to bust out an…
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Posted by Tom Stanley on April 12, 2009 at 11:40am —
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